Cornered by various

Author:various [various]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The ship stopped moving after five hours. Erika assumed it was five hours. She was usually good at estimating time, but it felt as if they’d been moving for five years. Cautiously, she lifted her head from between her knees and blotted her forehead on her sleeve.

How far had they traveled? The fact that they had gone anywhere without colliding with something was beyond her, but perhaps the fog had burned off with the sunrise. It would have to be late morning by now. She deduced the storm of the night before must have cleared, since the sea was relatively calm, apart from the occasional swell that treated her to a slow-motion, gut-churning, roller-coaster shrug.

The crate she was sitting on shifted uphill. Erika sank her nails into the wooden sides and inhaled shallowly through her nose until the floor and her stomach settled back into place. The Hershey’s bar was long gone, but it had served its purpose. She’d kept it down through sheer stubbornness—she didn’t want to waste perfectly good chocolate.

She pushed herself to her feet. She wavered a little until she got her balance, then inched her way to the door and groped for the wheel that served as its handle.

During the lulls in the swells, she’d explored every inch of this storeroom. She hadn’t found a porthole or any other exit. There was a grate in the ceiling beside the left wall that probably led to the ventilation system, but it would have been too small for her to get through, even if she’d had some tool to unfasten the screws. She hadn’t found a light switch, either. It had to be outside the door.

Damn the man. Couldn’t Sloan have turned on the light before he’d left? Okay, it might have been hard to explain to Leavish why a corpse would need a light. But would it have killed him to have given her some straight answers about what was going on? It wasn’t as if she was about to rush out there and try to interfere…

She leaned her shoulder against the door. Well, yes, that was exactly what she would do if she could. She would be out of this room like a shot if Sloan hadn’t locked her in. That was the primary reason he’d done it.

Sloan knew she couldn’t help being wired this way. She’d been an impressionable ten-year-old when she’d gone to live with her Uncle Hector. He’d put her to work polishing glasses at the Cherry on Top so that he could keep an eye on her after school. From her seat behind the bar, she’d grown up listening to the stories of men like Sloan and his friends. That’s what had inspired her to become a P.I., so she could have the challenge of solving crimes without having to put up with the police department bureaucracy the cops always complained about.

But whether the investigating was private or taxpayer-funded, nothing was ever a hundred-percent certain. No matter how much planning went into an undercover sting, stuff often went wrong.

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